|
Mankind Is Our Business
By Professor
Gnanaharan
May 2006
Declared Charles Dickens with an outburst of humanism. Milton Freidman,
the Nobel Prize winning economist advised businessmen few decades ago that
"the business of business is business". They seem to be at
loggerheads. But fortunately some kind of convergence is happening already.
The new recruitment strategy announced by Scope International Pvt Ltd. the
BPO company from the Standard Chartered Bank Group goes to prove this point.
Sreeram Iyer, the company's chief executive officer recently outlined a
three-dimensional recruitment strategy to widen the scope of its workforce.
First and foremost, Scope is foraying into Tier II cities in Tamilnadu. It has
already hired 50 people in Coimbatore and has plans to extend its recruitment
drive to places like Trichy, Pondicherry, Cuddalore, and Salem.
The second dimension of the strategy relates to hiring students who have
just passed plus two to work on simple processing. The company proposes to
part-finance their continuing education through correspondence.
Recruiting housewives in the 30 plus category represents the third plank of
Scope's recruitment strategy. It aims at recruiting those women who stopped working
due to family circumstances and other talented ones who do not wish to take
up a full-time job.
Mr.R.Seshasayee, President of Confederation of Indian Industry(CII) and other
captains of the industry are pitching for "affirmative action" as a
credible alternative to job reservation. It promotes an 'inclusive
development' by expanding the horizons of opportunity for an increasing
number of people. The recruitment strategy outlined by Sreeram Iyer could
well be taken as a blueprint for sustainable development of the BPO Industry
as a whole.
A wholesale adoption of this kind of a three-pronged recruitment strategy has
the potential to ensure a greater access to the existing talent pool and
develop a bigger pool of talent reservoir in the country. From the company
point of view, it helps maintain its competitive advantage in the global
market.
Competitive advantage of the BPO industry would best be attained, retained,
and even enhanced only by continuously going up in the industry's value chain
on the one hand and gradually disbursing the BPO activities to the second and
third tier cities. The latter plays a decisive role both in expanding the
size of the talent market and safeguarding the labour cost arbitrage vis-v
vis other competing nations.
This kind of a recruitment strategy can be considered as a Corporate Social
Responsibility(CSR) in its best form. Because it fulfills business objective
and social objective-all at the same time. Therefore,what Charles Dickens
famously observed need not live in the world of Best Literature. It can
transcend into the world of business as a best business practice promoting
Sustainable Development(SD).
A CSR initiative should go beyond boosting this year's or next year's profit
bottomline. But they can aim at boosting the same in the long run by focusing
on the other two Ps viz. People and Planet. The People part of the Triple
Bottomline can boost the future profitability by bringing in "the out of
scope" customers or any other segment of stakeholders. In this case, it
helps bring in out of scope employees into the company's fold.
Some time ago D. Sampath Kumar, Associate Editor in The Hindu Business Line
gave an expert lecture to our management students. While talking about the
role of news papers in understanding the business environment, Mr. Sampath
Kumar gave an interesting analogy. News papers present trees. It is upto the
reader to see them in the context of a forest.
What is happening in the BPO sector have to be seen in the larger context of
an increasing attrition rates, demand for talent chasing limited supply in
spite of widespread educated unemployment, the current controversy and
conflict over the issue of reservation, the future of Indian BPO industry
etc., The recruitment strategy announced by Sreeram Iyer of Scope needs to be
viewed in backdrop of above mentioned developments.
|